I would swap my garden, any garden ever made, for a decent piece of deciduous woodland. No habitat seems to me to be more congenial or rich in sensuous experience. It is partly the scale and relationships of objects to space - from the grandeur of a mature oak or beech to the intimacy of woodland flowers or even fallen leaves; partly the way that light constantly plays inside the trees, falling in beams and spangles or distant splashes; partly the sheer variety of flora and fauna that all coexist in a state of perpetual shifting poise; and partly the usefulness of a wood. A deciduous wood supports life as I want to know it. Woods are the best place to be busy and, as any fool knows, if you want to be happy, be quietly busy.

My friend Henry has nearly 200 acres of woods in Usk, south Wales, and I went there the other day to cut some hazel. 'You're a bit late' was the first thing Henry said. I was. I'd meant to go in January but things got complicated. By the end of March the hazel is heavy with sap and this makes it last a lot less long when cut. No matter. I cut enough for bean, clematis and sweet-pea tripods, which can all be replaced with more seasonally attuned sticks when they turn brittle and snap in the wind.

Over the years I have used hundreds of hazel rods as supports for climbers, both decorative and edible (as though the two were mutually exclusive) and they do all eventually snap at the point where they meet the ground. This means that one is forever coming across hazel-henges in the ground. I usually get them delivered, but that went badly wrong this year so I had to face Henry's gentle scorn and spend a day in the woods in radiant spring sunshine.

In my romanticism I see them as fences, handles, charcoal, bean sticks or whatever else man can devise, but Henry gets more for it as pulp than anything else. The Woodlanders it is not. But the plant does not mind. Once cut, it is all eventually pulp, either rotting below ground in my borders or processed by vast machines. This harvest happens every seven or eight years with hazel, 10 to 20 years with ash and 30 years with oak. No sooner are you done than it's back in a flash. But if you have more than an acre, you will coppice as much as you can manage every year, and traditionally this is two acres for a full-time woodman.

So, 24 acres of hazel would, at any one time, have 12 different stages of growth accompanied by 12 different stages of shade, ranging from the wholly open to almost complete summer cover. The net effect of this is to create a finely tuned, very varied micro-environment where plants, insects and animals can live in very tightly defined habitats with exactly the right amount of shade and cover that is both sustainable for centuries as well as changing every year.

Henry's woods were thickly speckled with wood anemone ( Anemone nemorosa ). I have them in our little coppice at home and they are slowly spreading, but in Usk they were there by the tens of thousand. If any plant can be compared to stars in a dark sky it is the anemone in April. Despite the sheer mass of them, each flower was somehow separate. They grow from a rhizome that creeps underground and, like primroses, do best in areas that are only lightly shaded, surviving the last few years of the coppice growth but bursting out in the years following a cut, providing pollen and nectar for the bees.

However efficient the anemone is at using the conditions of coppiced woods, it is an easily bruised thing set against the two real bruisers of woodland, the bluebell and wild garlic. The leaves of both were swarming over the woodland floor when I was there, the garlic fat spathes and bluebell more finely splayed, with not a flower in sight, although in this very early year I would expect the first bluebells to appear around the time you read this.

I had an astonishing encounter with wild garlic in the middle of May last year at the Nine Stones, just outside Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset. The stones are hard on the A35 but backed by a small wood, which was crammed with wild garlic ( Allium ursinum) or, to use their vernacular, ramsons. Despite the fumes of the lorries thundering by, the air was heavy with that curious sharp sweetness that garlic has, and the ground completely white with the flowers.

Because they are so invasive it is probably a mistake to plant ramsons in the garden, but tempting, as they are wildly decorative - and very edible, too, the strap-shaped leaves being a perfectly good substitute for 'real' garlic, both cooked and raw. They take a lot of shade, but need the open light of a deciduous winter, so could go in a corner where not much else would thrive.

Although bluebells and ramsons share a preference for light deciduous woodland with damp, preferably alkaline soil, they hardly ever grow together. Once one has a hold the other surrenders completely. So, although we have our small bit of our coppice where the bluebells are beginning to take off (and perhaps take over) which would be ideal for the garlic, too, I think the choice has already been made.

Bluebells ( Hyacinthoides non-scripta ) need more light than wild garlic to really take hold, and as long as the soil is sufficiently damp (but not boggy), can quite often be seen growing in fields or verges right away from a wood. My own most unlikely bluebell sighting was on the cliffs on Sark, in the Channel Islands, where bracken provided the necessary deciduous summer cover. Sometimes scattered woodland flowers in a meadow are the last vestiges of ancient woodland that might have been cleared centuries before, but I cannot believe that this was the case on these Atlantic cliffs.

The cover is necessary to stop grass establishing, which would push the bluebells - or wild garlic for that matter - out. They survive the deep shade of the end of the coppice cycle in an attenuated form, flowering modestly where grass gives up the ghost and then, when a coppice is cut, the bluebells go berserk and spread themselves wildly before the grass gets a look in. In the garden it makes sense to grow bluebells in a situation that mimics coppicing, but it is a hopeless plant for any kind of border as it will completely take it over, and the only thing that will suppress them will do in anything else growing there as well. So it is all or nothing.

You can buy the Spanish bluebell, H hispanica which is less invasive, but it has the futility of soya sausages or caffeine-free coffee. Far better to go with the real thing or go without. It also hybridises with our native bluebell, so never grow the two together or else you will end up with the sum of the worst parts, an invasive, squat, less delicate flower.

Bluebells have been the subject of much research into their chemistry because they seem to possess toxins that protect them - and potentially us - from serious infection and disease such as HIV and cancer. It is a big claim, and has yet to reach anything like a commercial proposition, but is certainly in the forefront of plant research, where the aim is to extract chemicals from plants and flowers rather than inventing or trying to mimic the chemicals in a lab.

Bluebells also produce a toxin that the plant uses to fight off potential pests such as nematodes that would otherwise eat the bulbs, and attempts are being made to extract this commercially as a natural pesticide. In fact, nothing will eat bluebells because of their toxicity, which is why you find them growing in great lakes in woods where all other undergrowth has been grazed off by deer or even cattle and sheep.

Gerard Manley Hopkins talks of 'the sweet gum when you bite them' so, although I have not tasted them myself, they will not kill you if you have a quiet nibble, or lick your fingers after picking the strangely juicy stems. But best not to pick as they do not last well in water and never look quite as good as you think they will. best to take yourself to a wood and just look. And look and look and look.

My roots: A week in Monty's garden

A few weeks ago on these pages I said words to the effect that it was always a mistake to make raised beds without a retaining edge of some kind, implying that only a feckless ignoramus would attempt such a thing. Which is perhaps why I spent the better part of two days last week making lovely, billowing, very unsupported raised beds.

Of course they would be lovelier had they been edged in oak boards, but it was either that or feed the children - and the children won out. This time. The truth is that I am proud of them, not least because they were such hard work to make, but also because I have been threatening to do them for ages.

Completion is one less quotient of guilt in my reproach-sodden life. We had such fabulous weather during Easter week that there was that complete luxury of walking away from a job without a backward glance at the end of the day and picking up where you left off the next morning. This is desperately rare in this garden. We dug the ground over, covered it with barrow-load after barrowload of compost that spread itself surprisingly thin, and rotovated it both ways. Then I marked out the beds again and shovelled the soil from the paths up on to the beds, which was the hard-work bit.

In the meantime, Sarah had passed some tree surgeons lopping a tree just down the road and arranged for them to come and shred our huge pile of prunings - another job that had been taunting me for months. This gave us back a huge area that had not been properly cleared for three years. It also gave me the material for the paths between the raised beds.

I put down a layer of Phormisol, a polypropylene sheeting that stops weeds, but which looks horribly aesthetically challenged. The fresh chippings gave it a layer of decency and cleared this new pile and - the list of triumph goes on and on - meant that in the process of decomposition the ground would not be robbed of nitrogen as it otherwise would if the horrible plastic layer was not between it and the ground.

My eldest son, who works hard at showing no interest in the garden, heard about the new beds and came to have a look, which was an occasion in itself. He said they looked like massed graves and only needed a headstone each to be complete. But he is an unappreciative youth and next time it will be oak edgings and no supper for any of them.